In all seriousness, what would we gain from new consoles at this point? We've reached the point where upgrades are going to graphically negligible. That used to be the benchmark for systems... last gen looked blocky and this gen looks more better. But can we really even DO that now? Do we need to do that now? I don't think we do. Companies have to be careful, especially with the world economy, not to push people away. As we all know, hardcore gamers do not pay the bills. I think this generation has many years left in it. And I'm speaking for Sony and Microsoft. Nintendo is living in their own world.
We're at least two console generations away from 1:1 parity with fmv in real time graphics. The biggest leaps you'll see come with next generation are improved lighting models (fully dynamic GI I hope, but doubt we'll see), higher resolution textures (FMV assets can use up to 32,000x res textures, games rarely go over 2048x atp), and smoother meshes thanks partly to dx11 tessellation. Water right now is pretty bad, it only deals with the surfaces as opposed to dynamic water volumes. Animation is still taking a back seat to basically everything else at most studios, with one or two exceptions like Naughty Dog. quality AI still requires a supercomputer with the software that exists today. etc.
I have to say, since selling everything video game related (apart from Steam stuff) I really wont be buying a new console. Gonna stick to the original Xbox I have and PC based stuff (less crap all over the place) and be happy with it.
Actually I'm so happy with retro stuff and the wealth of games available that I don't really keep up with new stuff all that much.
graphics have a vast potential to improve from today's crap. The day you can run something like the Indigo renderer in real time+gameplay/sound/OS etc is the day graphic's won't get any better than that. Until then, it's nice to see more power I'm curious about the WiiU, I think it will have a dreamcast feeling to it being so much earlier that almost blurs the rough line between this generation and the next.
Pretty lighting and water effects don't a good game make, nor will they ever. That's why the industry's in the sorry fucking state it is today.
Close, but wrong. The server side of things has to be able to handle all 64 players locations, movements, bullets, damage, etc. That takes an enormous amount of processing power and ram. I used to admin a Battlefield 2 server and in order to do 64 players we had to have something like a dual 3.4ghz Pentium 4 box with at least 4gb of ram. On top of that the server software had a well known and REALLY bad memory leak that would cause the server to crash after less than a day (typically) unless we reset it. Normally that would be done in the middle of the night as the server usually crashed at that point anyway. No idea how the 360 side of things works but it is a lot cheaper in terms of server power to do 24 players. On top of that I'm betting EA still requires people pay for "ranked" servers for Battlefield 3. The 64 player servers will probably be top dollar where as the 360 servers? Comes with Live....
xenoblade chronicles is a wonderful example of how a very very good game can exist without being the technical benchmark. In my opinion it`s time for new ideas rather than new hardware and catherine is a step in the right direction.
No single technical element makes for a good game, but they do provide new opportunities to developers. What those developers do with said opportunities though is up to them. If you want new ideas just check out what indie devs are doing. Improving technology never stopped new ideas from coming to light. If your looking for massive multi-national corporations to be the bringers of new and unique concepts as opposed to evolutionary changes to existing ones, yourdoingitwrong.jpg
You must really be out of touch with the games industry these days if you still think indie equates to "underground". Indies make up the majority of iOS and android titles, they're featured prominently on steam, and have notable presence on XBLA outside the existing indie games section.
That's all well and good, but the majority of iOS and android titles have the depth and longevity of a fart. For current gen designers the foreseeable future should be about maximising what's at their fingertips now, not throwing their hands up in despair saying ''woe is me, how can I be expected to work with such arcane hardware'' just because there may have been some technological advances in other parts of the gaming scene like the PC. If hobbyist coders can far outstretch hardware expectations with titles like Pier Solar for the Mega Drive, the various 'Chinese Originals' that still keep on appearing for the Famicom, dozens of Atari VCS 2600 games and up and coming Dreamcast titles like Gunlord and Sturmwind, then surely today's supposedly talented teams are a good few years off wringing the neck of this generations hardware, no?
I thought Indie meant independant, generally that means low budget and small games produced by a single person normally.
I think 10 years between consoles is about right. Microsoft refreshed its Xbox brand about halfway in (with the new dashboard, branding, packaging, console design and Kinect) which was the right thing to do. This allows them to maintain interest in the still-good platform architecture without allowing the image to get stale. Seeing Forza 4 in action reaffirms that there is still plenty of life and horsepower left in the 360 for years to come. That assumes that developers do things properly. Otherwise we are seeing areas (like in F1 2010) where frame rate can't keep up and along with questionable AI that could benefit from some more robust hardware. It's a trade off, but I think Microsoft would be wise to keep the 360 alive until at least 2015.
True the current console tech atp is still fine, it can't handle everything that PCs can but its close enough despite its age. However within the next few years that will change and at some point developers will have to start rebuilding games from scratch to fit the limitations of consoles, similar to the PS3/360 to Wii. This is both expensive and impractical, why would people go for the 'lesser' version of a game? The 'solution' is to make nothing but original games then for the consoles, unfortunatly that also has the problem by that point that your working to appeas a more limited audiance on an already declining format. Can more be done with this gens tech then already has been? Absolutely. But the difference between what it can do and what it is doing already isn't enough to really matter at the end of the day. More or less. Technically indie just means self published with no subsidiaries or independent branches. Although it popularly refers to small teams.
Unless games look like spirits within/Advent Children with NO popup it's not time for a new console anything new is just going to have a gimmick and not much of a graphical upgrade. The next gen should have at least 4 gigs of ram, a beast of a graphics card and be sub $300 we aren't there yet.
I'll take 'em on the level of Toy Story but I'd prefer more along the lines of A Bug's Life or even Monsters Inc. It'd be a little greedy of me to say Wall*E...
Longer console cycles are a good thing, I think. Prices have gone down dramatically on consoles that are still in full swing as far as development goes. I'm all about the value!
